B.S. Johnson Strikes Again

Lani and I talked last night and agreed that we are very lucky people–everybody we love is happy and in good health, we have a terrific living situation, we do work we care about and enjoy deeply–but that just AT THE MOMENT things are making us crazy. At the moment, hell, we're past the one month mark. Still, we know we're fortunate so when Life begins to shoot lemons at us out of a water cannon, we duck and weave and handle it as best we can. Case in point: my laptop which developed a strip of wriggling lines down the center of the screen. It now has two strips of wriggling lines. The replacement display is not in yet, and Alastair says there's something wonky with the hard drive. So I bought an iMac, a desktop system. No problem on waiting on the laptop (well, I like a laptop because it's portable but still), all I needed to do was set up my desk again and I'd be fine. Lani even spent a couple of hours painting the rest of the room that's my office so I could get it set up. Alastair moved all my files over to new computer. I spraypainted my desk. Everything was ready to go so that I could catch up with my seriously sprained online life not to mention my writing.

Enter Bloody Stupid Johnson.

The architect who designed this house, who shall be nameless (his name is not BS Johnson), was the worst designer in the history of architects. The house is built strong, but I've spent a lot of money and a lot of years trying to turn it into a place that's good for humans to live. I was doing pretty well–Alastair and Lani love it and so does Krissie–and when I saw my white desk in my white office with my new iMac on it, I was feeling pretty chipper about it, too, even though there are no windows in this room except for the sidelights on the door to the outside. (B.S. Johnson failed to put any windows on the front of this house. No, I'm not kidding. He made the back of the house solid window, so he didn't have an aversion to glass, but the front is just a wall of masonry, or was until I bought it and started punching in windows everywhere.)

So everything's set up, and I crawl underneath the desk to plug in my surge protector and discover there are no outlets on the wall. I think it's pretty much Architecture 101 to put an outlet on each wall, but not for B.S. Johnson. So you're thinking, stop meeping and just plug it into an outlet on a side wall. But you have forgotten we're talking about B.S. Johnson because there are no outlets that aren't blocked from the desk by a door because there are SEVEN doors in this room (and it's not a big room). Seven. The front door, the door to the storeroom, the door to the garage, the door to the bathroom, the door to the closet, the door to the elevator shaft (don't ask), and the door to the rest of the house. Which means there's only one wall that's big enough for my desk. There are two spaces on the opposite wall that might hold a much smaller desk except one would block the bathroom door and the other HAS A POLE THREE FEET FROM IT. Yes, B.S. put a pole in this room, too. Smack in the middle.

I've got a kludge working for the moment and Alastair has a plan, but my only hope now is that whatever is going on astrologically or karmic-ly or whatever is over soon. Because I am tired of being thwarted.

But I have a computer again, so life is good.